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Monday, January 5, 2015

San Diego Holiday Half Recap

One of the advantages of having parents who are full-time RVers is that you get to visit all kinds of great places! This Christmas, the RV was parked in San Diego with a beautiful view of Mission Bay! I'll have an update with a million pictures about the trip for you later this week, but one of the highlights was definitely the San Diego Holiday Half Marathon!

I registered for the race with just one month to train, but since I wasn't too far out from marathon training and had recently run a 10-mile race, I was in decent shape for it. The race is a point-to-point course that loses elevation (aka - it's mostly DOWNhill) and ends at Torrey Pines State Park - the beach!!

Let's start with one of my favorite parts of races - the swag - and this race gave awesome swag! The shirt is a long sleeve, red, tech material shirt - love the big palm trees! We also got some Lara bars, a full size Kind bar, an FRS energy drink, a 13.1 sticker, a small drawstring backpack, vitamin samples, and Advil Allergy.

The race start was "freezing" by San Diego standards (it was about 38-40), and I saw people decked out in full cold gear...which made me laugh! The end of race temperature was predicted to be around 60, so I chose my favorite capris (ProCompression) and a tank. I wore my DIY arm warmers (knee socks from Target with the toes cut off) until about mile 3.5 when I threw them to my parents.

After one hill at mile 1.5, the course started running along a bike path beside the freeway for about 8 miles. My mom snapped this picture of some runners along the way!

The course then continued on the bike path, but the path went through some more "nature" before coming out into the state park. I saw this sign along the way, and it reminded me of my friend Heidi, who says this a lot!

I felt some serious shin/calf pain the first 2ish miles of the race. Hiking a tough hike 2 days before was probably a bad idea!! The pain subsided after a little while and I just ran the best I could. I ended with a time of 02:07:17. I only did "speed" work for a month, so I was pleased with the time!

If you ever find yourself in the San Diego area in December, definitely check out this race!